Monday, March 26, 2012

They All Want Cape

I found this pattern on the Lion Brand yarn website.  Also, I had a buttload of wool yarn from a project that I'd never actually started.  And probably never will since I have no blocking resources.

After finishing it, I realized that I needed some way to connect the collar and that I was an incredibly lazy person.  Using my enormous brain, I decided to just sew the ends together.  Problem solved!

New problem: because of my enormous brain, it was a struggle to pull the capelet over my enormous head.  Also, brain size is not connected to intelligence.

Fortunately, I know somebody with kids who is also somebody who won't care that I'm giving her kid my failed projects.

For those of you interested in how light affects textile color, yes, these are the same item.  Sadly, it is not as Barney purple as it appears in the second picture.  I have been told the model's hobbies include watching Barney tapes until her mother wants to scream.

For attempt number two I'd been thinking about just using more of the stockpiled yarn (since I'm usually not going to the same parties as a two year old, and we'd both be wearing it differently).  I'd also been thinking about dying yarn with Kool Aid.  Having seen such an article in Crochet Today, I've gotten as far as buying packets of Kool Aid and thinking, "I should totally dye some yarn with this!"

This post, showing little swatches of Kool Aid dyed yarn, made me realize that I needed to dye some yarn with Blue Moon Berry Kool Aid.  Then I went to Michaels and saw that they had Full of Sheep on clearance in basically that exact same color, sparing me from accumulating more Kool Aid packets and thinking about all the yarn I'd be dying if I ever finished my thesis.

I think I started this while on the way to meet Friend with Kid for dinner.  Most of it was done while proctoring a practice SAT test for one of my schools.  Usually the principal's in there with me while I proctor the fake test, so the past few times I've sat there wondering how much attention I need to pay to the kids while the principal works on other administrative stuff and I just say how much time is left.  I think I finally rationalized crochet because I could, you know, look at the students and say what time it was while doing it, and proctoring a practice SAT test is one of the most boring things I've ever done.  Seriously, on one of the other testing days I started answering the sentence completions questions and reading the passages just for something to do.  

This time I added two hook and eye closures.  The first one's at the top, and the second one's around row three or four.  I'm considering wearing it to work on Monday so my students can see the advantages of not taking a nap during the practice test.

Monday, March 19, 2012

Fighting Evil by Moonlight

This week I'm on break from my thesis (since I can't be expected to work if I don't know what everyone hates about it!) so I've started my Sailor Moon sampler.  From cross stitching the brooch on a piece of scrap fabric, I've learned that backstitching around the circle looks great, but that trying to backstitch the crescent moon is a terrible idea.

Anyway, I figured the top of my sampler needed a picture of Sailor Moon, so I grabbed this sprite from Sailor Moon Another Story which is probably the closest possible pixel image of Sailor Moon's "I'll punish you!" pose.

This is about 2-3 nights of cross stitching, and I'm really happy with the way it turned out.  I need to figure out some backstitching on her left hand, even though it's probably too late to make that crazy hand thing (or feasible at this size).  Looking at it now, I should probably do a backstitch outline around the bow.  I'm still undecided about doing the lines on the pigtails--I don't know if it'll add some dimension (the way the bangs turned out) or if it'll just be noisy.  I'm also going to try to put some "pleats" on the skirt.

Yes, I have included the crescent moon on the boot.  It's basically invisible, but it's there.  Because I care about details like Sailor Moon cares about eating cake.